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Oligarcas Temblad!

Quico says: So, there’s an earthquake. It wakes you up. You turn on the TV and see a report about it. What do you think is more likely to leave you feeling alarmed, fearful, anxious or panicky? The earthquake, or the news story about it?

As I think about it, I can’t shake the feeling that the very ridiculousness of the charge tells its own story. There’s a message in it; a conscious decision to go after Globo on the most self-evidently ridiculous grounds possible, precisely as a way of flaunting the government’s arbitrary power.

After all, if you go after Globovision on grounds that someone could imaginably mistake as being rooted in the law, you might not quite get your message across. But go after them on grounds as transparently nonsensical as “you talked in public about something literally everyone in Caracas had felt minutes earlier”, and you make it perfectly that, no matter how vanilla the channel’s reporting gets, you’re still going to go after them…just cuz you can.